Abstract -- Electronic Commerce on Internet: What Is Still Missing?

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Abstract -- Electronic Commerce on Internet: What Is Still Missing? Commercial and Business Aspects Track
C4: Future of Commerce on the Net

Electronic Commerce on Internet: What Is Still Missing?

Milosevic, Zoran ( zoran@cs.uq.oz.au)
Bond, Andy ( bond@dstc.edu.au)

Abstract

Electronic commerce can be defined as that set of activities in which companies carry out business transactions by means of an electronic web which connects them. Until recently this has been the privilege of large companies which had the knowledge, technology and sufficient capital to invest in an electronic infrastructure that supports electronic business transactions. An important facilitator of business transactions has been the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) paradigm and associated standards such as the EDI standard set under the auspices of the United Nations, EDIFACT (EDI for Administration, Commerce and Trade), or ANSIX12 (developed by American National Standards Institute).

Examples abound which highlight the fact that companies which have seen new business opportunities that EDI provided have immensely benefited from being among the first who utilized it to increase the efficiency of their operations (both intra and inter-organisational) as well as to extend the scope of their businesses. This is augmented by the prevailing feeling in business today that global cooperations are becoming more critical for gaining and maintaining the competitive edge. Today's trend toward increased global interdependencies between businesses requires modern electronic infrastructure to support these transactions.

It is now recognised that Internet adds a new dimension to the electronic commerce paradigm. It is envisaged that Internet's role in electronic commerce is twofold:

disseminating new ways of doing business and making it available to the public (not only to large corporations)
providing a cheaper transport facility to companies who have already been involved in EDI and who might have been using expensive resources of dedicated and private networks

A number of commercial service providers are emerging who offer different kinds of electronic commerce functions. These cover a wide range of operations, such as advertising products and services via the commercial network providers, buying and selling goods electronically etc. Due to security and privacy reasons some operations are still done manually (e.g. sending credit card numbers for payment purposes).

However, an important element of business dealings i.e. support for business contract operations appears to be still missing in the world of electronic commerce. This includes a support for general contracts but also more specific, business contracts. Such support should be based on sound legal, economic and business principles to be widely acceptable and employed.

In this paper we will attempt to take a step in this direction, in that we will identify important business activities and practices associated with contracting, with the aim to automate them to the largest possible extent and incorporate them into a supporting IT business architecture framework. We look at business contracts from economic, legal and business points of view and map these concepts onto a general IT architecture which can support electronic business contracting.

Our aim is to investigate the applicability of a more general business contract architectural framework, which we are currently developing, to the specifics of Internet environment. This architectural framework is being developed in the context of open distributed systems and is guided by the principle of conformance to the relevant de-facto and de jure standards.

Therefore, based on the observations how contracts operate in business world, we demonstrate how a set of basic concepts of a business contract architecture can be developed. Particular areas which will be addressed in the paper are: definition of a contract domain, contract negotiation, validation, monitoring and enforcement concepts. We will demonstrate how each of these concepts can be realised in an open distributed system and also in the context of the Internet.